BBC News | SCI/TECH | 'Big bang' astronomer dies Wednesday, 22 August, 2001, 07:43 GMT 08:43 UK 'Big bang' astronomer dies Sir Fred challenged the belief the cosmos was caused by an explosion The English astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang" to describe an academic theory on the creation of the cosmos, has died at the age of 86. Despite popularising the theory by giving it a name, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle challenged the belief that the cosmos was caused by a huge explosion 12,000 million years ago. He advocated the "steady state" theory - that the cosmos had no beginning but new galaxies were formed as others moved apart. Sir Fred also rejected Darwin's theory of evolution, putting forward the so-called Panspermia Theory, which suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, could be carried to planets by comets or drifting interstellar dust particles. Sir Fred wrote A For Andromeda, which became a BBC-TV series He believed it had all been arranged by a super-intelligent civilisation who wished to seed our planet.

Sir Fred used this theory as the inspiration for one of his many science-fiction novels, The Black Cloud. Published in 1957, it described an intelligent cloud of cosmic dust sapping the Sun of solar energy to create a second Ice Age on Earth. In 1962, Sir Fred wrote A For Andromeda, which became a BBC-TV series, and his play for children, Rockets In Ursa Major, opened in the West End. Star gazing Born at Bingley in the West Riding of Yorkshire to wool merchant parents, he could navigate by the stars at the age of 10 and often stayed up all night gazing through his telescope. Sir Fred was educated at Bingley grammar school and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. In 1939, he was elected a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and married Barbara Clark. They had a son and a daughter.

Conducted research Sir Fred Hoyle; Coined 'Big Bang' - latimes Sir Fred Hoyle; Coined 'Big Bang' August 23, 2001 |From Times Staff and Wire Reports Sir Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist who coined the term "Big Bang" but never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe, has died. He was 86. Hoyle died Monday in Bournemouth, England, his family said. The cause of death was not announced. He became one of Britain's best-known astronomers in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on "The Nature of the Universe." He recalled using "Big Bang" for the first time in the last of those talks, but with derision to describe a theory on the origin of the universe that he didn't accept. Hoyle believed the universe came from a continuing pattern of development having no beginning and no end. But over the years this view was shared by fewer and fewer scientists as the Big Bang theory gained greater acceptance.

However, Hoyle continued to robustly defend his view, and last year published "A Different Approach to Cosmology," co-authored by Geoffrey Burbidge, a UC San Diego astrophysicist, and Jayant V. Narlikar. Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle proposed the steady-state theory in the 1940s. "Every cluster of galaxies, every star, every atom had a beginning, but the universe itself did not," Hoyle said. In Hoyle's view, stars were created by condensation, and their growth and development are fueled by the capture of further interstellar material until galaxies or clusters of galaxies combine. Hoyle believed that as new matter forms, the universe expands without end because it is infinite in space and time and the galaxies tend to space themselves more widely apart. As they do so, new galaxies form at such a rate that their average density in space remains unchanged with time. Although the individual clusters evolved, the universe does not.

In the 1950s, observations by radio astronomy demonstrated that the universe was expanding faster than Hoyle's theory predicted, giving credence to the view that the universe began in an explosion of incredibly dense matter--the theory Hoyle called the Big Bang. "He coined that phrase in fact as a denigration for the conventional wisdom," said Hoyle's associate, professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of University College, Wales. "And it was his belief, and it is also my belief, that the standard Big Bang theory, which says that everything began at a definite moment in time and that there was nothing before that, this has to be essentially wrong, and that the universe has an infinite age and an infinite extent in space," Wickramasinghe said Wednesday on British Broadcasting Corp. radio. Hoyle's best work may have come later in the 1950s when he teamed with Fulbright scholar William Fowler and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge to demonstrate that chemical elements heavier than helium were the product of nuclear reactions inside stars. The theory of nucleosynthesis was described in "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" in 1957.

With Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the theory that life--and some diseases, including AIDS--reached Earth from space. Their publications included "Diseases From Space" (1979) and "Space Travelers: The Origins of Life" (1980). Hoyle also was a staff member of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories from 1957 to 1962, visiting professor at Caltech in 1953 and 1954, and professor of astronomy at Cornell University from 1972 to 1978. Hoyle was born in Bingley, Yorkshire. His father sold textiles and the family was not well off. As a child, Hoyle skipped school often and amused himself reading chemistry texts at home. He moved into the experiment phase, making gunpowder and setting off blasts. He eventually won a scholarship to a local private school,and that led to Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1939. During World War II, he led a group that developed radar for the British Admiralty. Bondi and Gold, who later worked with Hoyle on the steady-state theory, were also on that team.

Hoyle played a key role in establishing the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge and, beginning in 1958, was the institute's first director. He held that post until 1972 when he resigned in a dispute with other academics on the future of the institute's development. For his part, Hoyle was not much concerned that his theories were less well received over the years, noting in a 1994 interview with the Times of London: "What people tend to say about my work is that for the last 15 years, it has been all wrong, while previously it was about 80% right," he said. "What I think is that one's score doesn't really change." A prolific writer of scientific papers and books, Hoyle also wrote science fiction, including "The Black Cloud" (1957), about an intelligent cloud around the sun that caused an ice age, and "A for Andromeda" (1962), about aliens instructing humans on building a destructive machine. Several of the books were co-authored by his son, Geoffrey.

In addition to his son, Hoyle is survived by his wife of 61 years, Barbara Clark, and a daughter, Elizabeth Jeanne Butler. MORE: Fred Hoyle Dies at 86; Opposed 'Big Bang' but Named It - The New York Times The New York Times World |Fred Hoyle Dies at 86; Opposed 'Big Bang' but Named It Search Fred Hoyle Dies at 86; Opposed 'Big Bang' but Named It By WALTER SULLIVAN Continue reading the main story Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most creative and provocative astrophysicists of the last half century, who helped explain how the heavier elements were formed and gave the name Big Bang, meant to be derisive, to the theory of cosmic origin he vehemently opposed, died on Monday in Bournemouth, England. He was 86 and lived in Bournemouth. He suffered a severe stroke last month and never recovered, said Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge, an astrophysicist at the University of California at San Diego who had collaborated with Dr. Hoyle on many research projects. ''Fred was probably the most creative and original person in astrophysics after World War II,'' Dr.

Burbidge said. Dr. Virginia Trimble, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Irvine, said that Dr. Hoyle's opposition to the Big Bang, while considered a mistake, ''was significant in that it went a long way toward making cosmology a true science'' in which competing theories were tested by observations. -------------------- A Cosmic Rebel By WALTER SULLIVAN A versatile scientist brimming with ideas and a lifelong rebel eager for intellectual combat, Dr. Hoyle was most widely known as an author of the cosmological theory, which now has few adherents, that the universe exists in a steady state. The theory, published in 1948, contends that matter is constantly being created, so the expanding universe remains roughly the same at all times and has no beginning or end. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In a series of popular radio talks in Britain in the 1940's, he coined ''big bang'' to ridicule the rival concept of an explosive origin of the universe, but the term is now widely used and the explosion theory is generally accepted. In recent years Sir Fred joined those arguing for a universe that -- while eternal -- expands and contracts.

The astronomer was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England and became its first director. From 1958 to 1972 he was also Plumian professor of astronomy at the university, a post previously held by such leading scientists as Sir Arthur Eddington, whose groundbreaking experiments confirmed the general theory of relativity. A historic development in astrophysics was explaining how the elements came to be synthesized step by step in the stars, starting from hydrogen and helium. In the 1930's, Dr. Hans Bethe and others showed how stars could derive their energy from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei (protons) to form helium. The problem Dr. Hoyle and colleagues faced was how slightly larger elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen were formed by stars. An element called beryllium-8, which was an intermediate stage in the process of element formation, stood in the way. It did not survive long enough for the fusion process to reach carbon-12, the next stage in the element building process. Dr.

Hoyle solved the problem: he pressed nuclear physicists to look for a special state of carbon-12, that was stable enough for the fusion of heavier elements to occur. Then, working with three other scientists, Dr. Hoyle figured out how all the heavier elements could have been formed. Their historic paper was published in 1957 in Reviews of Modern Physics. In addition to Dr. Hoyle, the scientists were Dr. William A. Fowler, ofCalifornia Institute of Technology; Dr. Burbidge and Dr. Margaret Burbidge, his wife. While the formation of the lighter elements, up to iron, could be explained by processes inside stars, extremely high temperatures and violent events were needed. The answer proposed by the four was the supernova, in which a giant star collapses to extreme density, then cataclysmically rebounds. For this and his subsequent work in astrophysics, Dr. Fowler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The other three were omitted, probably in part because the prize is rarely, if ever, awarded to more than two people. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Fred Hoyle's noncomformity manifested itself at an early age.

Born in Bingley, Yorkshire, he found school boring, preferring to remain at home studying a textbook in elementary chemistry and doing chemistry experiments with equipment he found in his home. As recounted in his 1994 autobiography, ''Home Is Where the Wind Blows,'' in his parents' absence he enjoyed making gunpowder and creating explosions. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy As school was compulsory, his absence led to difficulties with the local authorities. The family did not have the funds to send him to a private school, but he finally won scholarships, including one from the West Riding of Yorkshire, and started on the path that eventually led him to Cambridge. As soon as he reached Cambridge he came under the tutelage of such top physicists as Rudolph Peierls, Eddington, P. A. M. Dirac and R. H. Fowler, whose calculations set the stage for the concept of black holes, stars whose collapse has yielded such density that the gravity prevents even light from escaping.

During World War II he led a radar development group at an Admiralty Signal Establishment center in West Sussex, near the south coast. Working under him were two refugees from Vienna: Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. During the day the trio worked on radar. At night they discussed astrophysics, developing the steady-state cosmology. They accepted the evidence for its constant expansion, but proposed that matter is constantly formed to fill the gaps. In 1995 Dr. Bondi and Dr. Gold credited Dr. Hoyle with first proposing such continuous creation of new matter. Dr. John Faulkner, of the Lick Observatory in California, said that during the ''magical six years'' after establishment of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge in 1966, it became ''an obligatory mecca'' for young American astronomers, many of whom felt the institute ''fostered their best work.'' But by his own account Sir Fred never shrank from controversy, and in 1972, after a falling out with Cambridge officialdom and rancorous debate on the future of British astronomy, he resigned as director of the institute. Sir Fred's work on interstellar organic molecules led him to propose that life originated in space.

Working with a student, Chandra Wickramasinghe, he championed the unorthodox theory that the seeds of life, including disease viruses, periodically fall from space. They attributed the onset of various epidemics to such viruses, attempting to document this in the simultaneous appearance of influenza at schools in remote parts of England and Wales. These theories are reflected in titles of the books he did with Dr. Wickramasinghe: ''Lifecloud'' (1958), ''Diseases from Space'' (1979), ''Space Travelers: The Origins of Life'' (1980) and ''Cosmic Life Force'' (1988). His more conventional writing produced ''Frontiers of Astronomy,'' a widely used text. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Dr. Hoyle, along with Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge and Dr. Jayant V. Narliker, renewed their fight against Big Bang orthodoxy with the book ''A Different Approach to Cosmology'' (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Dr.

Hoyle was also a prolific author of science fiction, producing almost one book a year between 1950 and 1990, some written with his son, Geoffrey. Among the best known were ''The Black Cloud'' (1957) and ''Ossian's Ride'' (1958). In 1957 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and in the early 1970's he was president of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was knighted in 1972. In recent years he lived in Bournemouth. In addition to his son, also of Bournemouth, he is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Clark, whom he married in 1939, and a daughter Elizabeth Butler, a London stockbroker. ''Home for Hoyle,'' Stephen G. Brush, a science historian, wrote in 1995, ''is not a cozy cottage with an overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace. Not for him the comforts of academic tenure and the polite respect of colleagues.

He is at home on the tops of mountains, at the cusps of controversies, where the winds blow fiercely and even God is not omnipotent but, as Hoyle says, just 'doing his best' to make an adequate universe.'' BBC News | UK | 'Big bang' astronomer dies Wednesday, 22 August, 2001, 08:56 GMT 09:56 UK 'Big bang' astronomer dies Sir Fred challenged mainstream opinion The English astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang" to describe an academic theory on the creation of the cosmos, has died at the age of 86. Despite popularising the theory by giving it a name, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle challenged the belief that the cosmos was caused by a huge explosion about 12,000 million years ago. He advocated the "steady state" theory - that the cosmos had no beginning but new galaxies were formed as others moved apart. Sir Fred also put forward the so-called Panspermia Theory, which suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, could be carried to planets by comets or drifting interstellar dust particles.

Sir Fred wrote A For Andromeda, which became a BBC-TV series starring Julie Christie He believed it had all been arranged by a super-intelligent civilisation who wished to seed our planet. Sir Fred - an honorary professor at the University of Wales, Cardiff, at the time of his death - used this theory as the inspiration for one of his many science fiction novels, The Black Cloud. Published in 1957, it described an intelligent cloud of cosmic dust sapping the Sun of solar energy to create a second Ice Age on Earth. In 1962, Sir Fred wrote A For Andromeda, which became a BBC-TV series, and his play for children, Rockets In Ursa Major, opened in the West End. Star gazing Born at Bingley in the West Riding of Yorkshire to wool merchant parents, he could navigate by the stars at the age of 10 and often stayed up all night gazing through his telescope. Sir Fred was educated at Bingley grammar school and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. In 1939, he was elected a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and married Barbara Clark. They had a son and a daughter.

Conducted research Big bang critic dies (Fred Hoyle) - creation.com Big bang critic dies (Fred Hoyle) by Greg Demme and Jonathan Sarfati Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who coined the term ‘big bang,’ died on Monday, 20 August 2001, from complications following a severe stroke. 1 Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1915, Hoyle was one of Britain’s best-known mathematicians and astronomers in the last half of the 20th century. He spent decades searching for answers to questions of the origins of life and the origin and age of the universe. In the 1940s, he, along with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, proposed the ‘steady state’ theory, a belief that the universe had no beginning or end, but always existed and would continue to exist. All these men were strong humanists, so they rejected any theory that seemed to teach a beginning for the universe, because that would point to a Beginner—see the discussion in If God created the universe, then who created God?

Their bias was so strong that they were even prepared to violate the fundamental Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy, which states that mass/energy in the universe can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, this fundamental law is consistent with Genesis—God’s creation of the space-time universe was finished after six days. But the Steady State Theory posits a continual spontaneous appearance of hydrogen atoms from nothing. But because the evidence of the rapid expansion of the universe exceeded the predictions of Hoyle’s theory, and because of the reluctance to believe that fundamental laws were violated, many astronomers began to postulate that an explosion of highly dense matter was the beginning of all space and time. In his 1950 BBC radio series, The Nature of the Universe, Hoyle mockingly called this idea the ‘big bang,’ considering it preposterous. 2 Yet the theory—and the derisive term—have become mainstream, not only in astronomy but in society as well. Hoyle readily saw through the fallacious assumptions behind the ‘big bang’ theory.

In 1994 he wrote, ‘Big-Bang cosmology refers to an epoch that cannot be reached by any form of astronomy, and, in more than two decades, it has not produced a single successful prediction.’ 3 Even though many people currently consider cosmic microwave background radiation a successful prediction of the ‘big bang,’ this is very shaky, and would fit better with Dr Russ Humphreys’ cosmological model that involves God having stretched out the cosmos ( Isaiah 42:5 ). This should be a lesson to ‘big-bang’ apologists, who are seduced by its apparent teaching of a beginning of the universe and simply ignore the contradictions with God’s Word. What happens to their apologetic framework if the secular astronomical community goes along with Hoyle after all, and rejects the ‘big bang’? Then the ‘big-bang’ apologists would need to reinterpret their reinterpretations of Genesis! See also What are some of the problems with the Big Bang theory? Also, commenting on the general state of mainstream cosmology, Hoyle and several colleagues wrote, ‘Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on very few facts.

The strong tendency is to replace a need for more facts by conformity.’ 4 Though Hoyle was not a Biblical creationist or even a Christian, he eventually recognized the impossibility of Darwinian evolution. Hoyle regularly took to task the Darwinian establishment for ignoring the complex sources of information and information processing programs (like DNA) needed for the creation and continuation of life. He realised that life couldn’t have arisen by chance in a primordial soup on Earth. First, he tried to solve the problem by saying that if we had the whole universe to work with instead of Earth, then this might overcome the problem. Hoyle favored and popularized a view called panspermia, the notion that life originated somewhere else in the universe and was driven to earth by electromagnetic radiation pressure. But eventually he realised that even this would be woefully inadequate as a materialistic explanation of life’s origin. In his 1981 book Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), he calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in 1040,000 (one followed by 40,000 zeroes).

Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), even a whole universe full of primordial soup wouldn’t have a chance. Hoyle explained this in his typically lucid manner, and as with the ‘big bang,’ his turns of phrase have found their way into popular culture. For instance, he wrote, ‘The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.’ 5 Hoyle originated the famous illustration comparing the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that ‘a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.’ 6 Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving the Rubik’s Cube simultaneously—see Rubik’s Cube and Blind Men . Some more problems with evolutionary ‘origin-of-life’ scenarios can be found in our Q&A pages under Origin of Life and Probability .

Hoyle eventually came to believe that the fine-tuning of the universe as a whole was further evidence for a designer: ‘A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics … The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.’ 7 The fine-tuning of fundamental constants is indeed amazing, but creationists must be cautious—some of the alleged ‘fine-tuning’ presupposes a big bang or other evolutionary cosmology. Alas, Hoyle paid for his outright questioning of the materialist paradigm. In the 1950s, Hoyle had some ingenious ideas about stellar fusion, and predicted that the Carbon-12 nucleus would have a certain energy level (called a resonance) to enable helium to undergo fusion. 8 His co-worker William Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 (with Subramanyan Chandrasekhar), but for some reason Hoyle’s original contribution was overlooked, and many were surprised that such a notable astronomer missed out. Fowler himself in an autobiographical sketch affirmed Hoyle’s immense contribution: ‘Fred Hoyle was the second great influence in my life.

The grand concept of nucleosynthesis in stars was first definitely established by Hoyle in 1946.’ But for all his ability to see through popular anti-God science, Hoyle’s own views about God were equally un-Biblical. He still held onto panspermia, and in his last book, A Different Approach to Cosmology, Hoyle and his co-authors reaffirmed a quasi-steady-state theory for the universe, but this time one that requires ongoing episodic creation by some intelligent force within the universe (a complete denial of a six-day Creation ex nihilo by a transcendent, personal God). Hoyle was also known as a science fiction writer. That he took to this sort of writing is not surprising, given his fascination with space and extraterrestrial life forces. While Hoyle’s comments on the ‘big bang’ theory and Darwinian evolution are helpful, it is sad to see that Hoyle died apparently having rejected the truth about Creation. God has revealed the truth for all to see in the Bible, the History Book of the Universe. All the answers about the origins of life and the universe can be found right there in the first book, Genesis.

Sir Fred Hoyle 1915 - 2001 - physicsworld.com Sir Fred Hoyle 1915 - 2001 Aug 22, 2001 The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle has died at the age of 86. Hoyle famously coined the phrase 'big bang' to describe the explosion in which the universe was born, but rejected that idea in favour of his 'steady-state' theory. Hoyle was the first to realise that all chemical elements are created inside stars by nucleosynthesis - a central idea in modern astrophysics - but missed out on a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Hoyle's 1953 prediction that an excited form of carbon-12 would be produced within stars was soon proved correct by the observations of William Fowler. Together with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, Hoyle and Fowler published their theory of nucleosynthesis in 1957. The astronomical community was shocked when Fowler alone received the 1983 Nobel Prize for this groundbreaking work.

Hoyle also believed that the now-accepted 'big bang' theory - which describes how the universe was created in a cataclysmic explosion and has been expanding ever since - was flawed. In his opinion, the big bang could not have taken place unless space and time already existed. This led him to propose a 'steady-state' universe in which matter is continually generated by some as yet unknown mechanism. Hoyle could not explain the subsequent discovery of the microwave background radiation - widely believed to be a remnant of the big bang - but his challenge to the accepted theory prompted the research that ultimately proved it right. In the early 1960s, Hoyle established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge University, but his relationship with the university broke down following administrative quarrels. Hoyle was also persuaded by the sponsors of the Mullard Radioastronomy Observatory at Cambridge to attend a meeting at which his steady-state theory was publicly ridiculed. Born in Yorkshire in 1915, Hoyle attended Bingley grammar school before gaining entrance to Cambridge University, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Paul Dirac.

Ever the maverick, Hoyle's recent investigations with Chandra Wickramasinghe explored the controversial idea that life on Earth may have originated from extra-terrestrial microbes. What is the Big Bang Theory? What is the Big Bang Theory? What is the Big Bang Theory? John Lund/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images By Andrew Zimmerman Jones Updated April 28, 2016. The Big Bang is the dominant (and highly supported) theory of the origin of the universe. In essence, this theory states that the universe began from an initial point or singularity which has expanded over billions of years to form the universe as we now know it. Early Expanding Universe Findings In 1922, Russian cosmologist & mathematician Alexander Friedman found that solutions to Einstein's general relativity field equations resulted in an expanding universe. As a believer in a static, eternal universe, Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations, "correcting" for this "error" and thus eliminating the expansion. He would later call this the biggest blunder of his life. Actually, there was already observational evidence in support of an expanding universe.

In 1912, American astronomer Vesto Slipher observed a spiral galaxy (considered a "spiral nebula" at the time, since astronomers didn't yet know that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way) and recorded its redshift . continue reading below our video Test Your General Science Knowledge He observed that all such nebula were traveling away from the Earth, though these results were quite controversial at the time and the full implications of them were not considered at the time. In 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble was able to measure the distance to these "nebula" and discovered that they were so far away that they were not actually part of the Milky Way ... he had discovered that the Milky Way was only one of many galaxies, and that these "nebulae" were actually galaxies in their own right. Birth of the Big Bang In 1927, Roman Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre independently calculated the Friedman solution and again suggested that the universe must be expanding. This theory was supported by Hubble when, in 1929, he found that there was a correlation between the distance of the galaxies and the amount of redshift in that galaxy's light.

The distant galaxies were moving away faster, which was exactly what was predicted by Lemaitre's solutions. In 1931, Lemaitre went further with his predictions, extrapolating backwards in time find that the matter of the universe would reach an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This means the universe must have begun in an incredibly small, dense point of matter - a "primeval atom." Philosophical Side note: The fact that Lemaitre was a Roman Catholic priest concerned some, as he was putting forth a theory which presented a definite moment of "creation" to the universe. In the 20's & 30's, most physicists - like Einstein - were inclined to believe that the universe had indeed always existed. In essence, the Big Bang theory was seen as "too religious" by many people. Proving the Big Bang While several theories were presented for a time, it was really only Fred Hoyle 's steady state theory which provided any real competition for Lemaitre's theory. It was, ironically, Hoyle who coined the phrase "Big Bang" during a 1950's radio broadcast, intending it as a derisive term for Lemaitre's theory.

Steady State Theory: Basically, the steady state theory predicted that new matter was created such that the density and temperature of the universe remained constant over time, even while the universe was expanding. Hoyle also predicted that denser elements were formed from hydrogen & helium through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis (which, unlike steady state, has proved to be accurate). George Gamow - one of Friedman's pupils - was the major advocate of the Big Bang theory. Together with colleagues Ralph Alpher & Robert Herman, he predicted the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation , which is a radiation that should exist throughout the universe as a remnant of the Big Bang. As atoms began to form during the recombination era , they allowed microwave radiation (a form of light) to travel through the universe ... and Gamow predicted that this microwave radiation would still be observable today. The debate continued until 1965, when Arno Penzias & Robert Woodrow Wilson stumbled upon the CMB while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories. Their Dicke radiometer, used for radio astronomy & satellite communicate, picked up a 3.5 K temperature (a close match to Alpher & Herman's prediction of 5 K).

Throughout the late 1960's & early 1970's, some proponents of steady state physics attempted to explain this finding while still denying the Big Bang theory, but by the end of the decade it was clear that the CMB radiation had no other plausible explanation. Penzias & Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Cosmic Inflation Theory Certain concerns, however, remained regarding the Big Bang theory. One of these was the problem of homogeneity. Why does the universe look identical, in terms of energy, regardless of which direction one looks? The Big Bang theory does not give the early universe time to reach thermal equilibrium , so there should be differences in energy throughout the universe. In 1980, American physicist Alan Guth formally proposed inflation theory to resolve this and other problems. Inflation basically says that in the early moments following the Big Bang, there was an extremely rapid expansion of the nascent universe, driven by "negative-pressure vacuum energy" (which may be in some way related to current theories of dark energy ). Alternatively inflation theories, similar in concept but with slightly different details, have been put forward by others in the years since.

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) program by NASA, which began in 2001, has provided evidence which strongly supports an inflation period in the early universe. This evidence is especially strong in the three-year data released in 2006, though there are still some minor inconsistencies with theory. The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John C. Mather & George Smoot , two key workers on the WMAP project. Existing Controversies While the Big Bang theory is accepted by the vast majority of physicists, there are still some minor questions concerning it. Most importantly, however, are the questions which the theory cannot even attempt to answer: What existed before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? Is our universe the only one? The answers to these questions may well exist beyond the realm of physics, but they're fascinating nonetheless, and answers such as the multiverse hypothesis provide an intriguing area of speculation for scientists and non-scientists alike. Other Names for the Big Bang When Lemaitre originally proposed his observation about the early universe, he called this early state of the universe the primeval atom. Years later, George Gamow would apply the name ylem for it.

It has also been called the primordial atom or even the cosmic egg. The Big Bang’s Identity Crisis - The Nature of Reality — The Nature of Reality | PBS The Big Bang’s Identity Crisis Comment Think of the Big Bang, and you probably imagine a moment in time when matter, energy and space itself all burst into existence at once. Yet many astrophysicists now believe that the “Big Bang” was actually two distinct events: first the inaugural instant of space and time, and second the generation of most of the “stuff” that populates that space. So, which really deserves to be called the Big Bang? More bang for the buck? Credit: jeff_golden /Flickr, adapted under a Creative Commons license. Ambiguity has plagued the expression “Big Bang” since its origin. When British astronomer Fred Hoyle coined it during a radio interview in 1948, he meant it as the ultimate put down. Hoyle refused to believe that the universe had a beginning, a first moment of time and a genesis of all matter and energy. Rather, he thought that the cosmos maintained itself in a “steady state” through a slow trickle of particles into reality.

He hypothesized a “creation field” that would gradually generate new matter to fill the gaps between galaxies moving away from each other, keeping the overall density of the universe the same. Hoyle had a point: Science rightly eschews processes without clear mechanisms, and at the time, no one could explain how the whole cosmos could emerge instantly out of nothing. Nevertheless, his alternative steady state approach could not match up with mounting evidence that the observable universe was once extremely hot and dense. In 1964, Bell Laboratory researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the smoking gun: cooled-down radiation from the early universe, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which convinced almost everyone in the scientific community that the universe started with a bang. The discovery of the CMB was a victory for the Big Bang theory, yet it also presented a puzzle: The radiation was strikingly uniform across the sky. While later studies identified tiny variations of less than one part in 10,000, the standard Big Bang model couldn’t justify such uniformity. There simply wasn’t enough time in early cosmic history, when the universe was small, for energy to have traveled across space and evened out its temperature.

Enter the brilliant concept of inflation, proposed in 1981 by Alan Guth , and later modified by Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, Andreas Albrecht, and others. Guth realized that a sudden, ultra-rapid stretching of the universe could take a tiny uniform patch and expand it to a size where it ultimately would grow and become the observable universe. During the fleeting instant of inflation, any irregularities in the primordial cosmos would be propelled beyond detection, offering a kind of blank slate. It is like taking a crinkled tablecloth and stretching it out so quickly that it appears flat on a tabletop and any wrinkles left are off the table and out of view. Only tiny, jiggling quantum fluctuations would disturb the uniformity; these fluctuations would be the seeds of the galaxies and galaxy clusters we see today. Inflation solved critical problems in cosmology, but it also split the Big Bang into distinct phases: In the inflationary portrait, the creation of almost all of the matter and energy in the universe takes place at the close of the inflationary period, through a process called “reheating,” rather than before inflation.

Reheating involves a massive release of energy from inflation’s driving engine: an entity called the “ inflaton ,” thought to be a fluctuating energy field that ignited ultra-rapid cosmic expansion. Theorists think that at the end of inflation, the inflaton field released an enormous reservoir of potential energy into space—which, following Einstein’s famous equivalence between energy and mass, converted into a deluge of particles. Before then, because stretching causes cooling, the universe was actually relatively cold. As the cosmos rapidly expanded, its hot initial temperature dropped by a factor of many thousand (the precise amount depends on the particular model), becoming extraordinarily hot only after reheating. If you feel that an event should be fiery if it’s going to be called the “Big Bang,” then reheating, not the cosmic dawn, was the true “bang.” (Max Tegmark has made this case in a recent blog post .) So, science is faced with a dilemma. Which moment should the term “Big Bang” refer to: cosmic genesis, when space emerged, or the time of reheating, when most of the matter and energy was created?

If the Big Bang denotes post-inflationary reheating, then we’ll have to talk about pre-Big Bang cosmology, which makes cosmologists squirm. Also, reheating occurred at slightly different times in various parts of the universe, making it more of a process than a sudden burst. On the other hand, if the Big Bang refers to the first moment of time, it was not much of a “bang.” That’s because the energy fields created then wouldn’t have been very hot. Furthermore, in some versions of inflation, the seeds of rapid growth developed from the loam of an eternal cosmos . In that case, there could have been no initial moment of creation. Perhaps it is time to replace the expression “Big Bang” with more precise nomenclature. Could there be a better way of distinguishing the idea of an initial cosmic moment from the concept that a field caused sudden expansion that tapered off and led to the generation of matter and structure? Unfortunately, past attempts to find a replacement term for “Big Bang” have met with failure. Most famously, in 1993 Sky and Telescope magazine sponsored a contest to identify a new name.

Astronomer and science writer Timothy Ferris, who called for a better designation, served as one of the judges. Ferris said in an interview that the term was “inappropriately bellicose” and unsuitable for conveying “the event thought to have spawned the starry skies.” Despite more than 13,000 submissions from participants in 41 countries, including colorful suggestions such as “The Grand Expansion,” “The Hubble Bubble,” and “The First Fireball,” the contest was declared a bust. The judges did not find any of the entries as simple and evocative as “Big Bang.” Consequently, they announced that nobody had won and that the old name would remain . More than 20 years later, “Big Bang” still doesn’t seem quite right, especially as cosmology has declared the nascent history of the cosmos more complex than once believed. Perhaps as our picture of the early universe continues to become more refined, new names will emerge to mark the complexity of its initial development. Just as we talk about an ovum, zygote, embryo and fetus in the process of human development, maybe we will someday have precise terms for early phases in the emergence of space, time, energy and matter.

Go Deeper

Question: Which astronomer coined the term 'Big Bang'?
Answer: Fred Hoyle